Growing Little Red Potatoes

The Tucson Gardener

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Growing Little Red Potatoes
Several years ago I tried my hand at growing sweet potatoes in one of my cement block raised beds. I ordered the potato slips from one of the mail order catalogs and they arrived in fairly good shape. I planted, they grew then died and I was anxious to dig them up and have some nice baked sweet potatoes from my garden. I dug, but found not much more than small bug eaten sweet potatoes. In my book it was what I would call a crop failure and I wasn't too anxious to try potatoes in my garden ever again.

Then one spring I noticed some potato slips coming from the compost bin form a few small red potatoes that had been composted. I took the four or five slips and moved them to a compost heap and replanted them. They grew quite nicely and then died off. When I dug around in the compost, I found a dozen or so nice sized red potatoes. Certainly enough for a batch of potato salad. After seeing the little reds I figured it was time to try another effort at growing some kind of potatoes.

Nice looking sweet potato vines growing in raised beds and protected with netting. Unfortunately when it came time to dig, there wasn't much of a reward.
Red potato ready to be planted.

Instead of ordering from a seed catalog I managed to find ready packaged red seed potatoes at one of the home improvement garden centers. I picked up a couple of bags of the already sprouting seed potatoes and took them home. I had an inexpensive rolled up compost bin and pulled it out of storage to use as a potato growing bin. I lined the plastic bin with nylon window screen to block all the large holes used for air circulation when making compost. I then filled the bin with ready to use compost and planted about a dozen of the little potatoes and watered. To keep the birds away I used clothespins to hold another piece of the nylon window screen over the top. In a week or two I had plants starting to emerge from the soil. All I had to do was make sure the compost didn't dry out too much and cover the potato plants with some straw as they started toward the top of the bin. In a couple of months I hoped to harvest my first planned for potato crop. Seemed simple enough.

Compost filled, recycled plastic compost bin turned into a potato growing bin.
Sprouting seed potatoes ready to be covered with more compost.
Nylon window screen covering the sprouting red potatoes and held in place with clothespins.
About a month after planting the seed potatoes the plants were looking pretty good.

I had a few extra potatoes that I needed to plant so I found a large unused 17 gallon plastic container in the garden shed and drilled a few holes in the bottom for drainage. I filled the container with compost and then planted the remaining four or five seed potatoes and watered. I placed the container on top of a straw bale where I hoped to keep the night time visiting Javelina away. Once the plants sprouted I filled the remaining portion of the container with straw. Now it's water and wait.

Update: As the red potato vines grew I added more compost to cover the vines filling the compost bin within a few inches of the top. I also covered the plants with light weight floating row covers to keep birds and insects at bay. Some of the potato vines tried to poke out the holes of the compost bin so I cut the screen so the vine could continue to grow. The Javelinas found them and nibbled them off. They grew back and I've been waiting for the Javelina to find them again.

Red potato plants were busting out of the top of the container by the end of March.
Small cuts in the screen allowed the potato vines to exit out the side. Vines were eaten by passing Javelina once but grew back.

By the first week of May the potatoes in the compost bin hade taken a severe turn for the worse. Lots of heavy wind broke them and many of the vines rotted. Next time I won't be hilling the vines thinking they'd root along the buried vine and produce more potatoes. No such luck. Just insect eaten and dead vines.

I did dig down in the compost with my hand where I new one of the seed potatoes had been planted. Surprisingly there were quite a few different sized red potatoes. Once the vine dies the potatoes stop growing so there was no sense leaving them for the insects to eat.

Some very sad looking potato vines. Many of them bent over and broken. Some were removed because they had rotted.
The vines showed signs of insect damage and they also looked like they rotted because of moisture and the compost I had added to hill the vines.
A few various sized potatoes dug from a starter potato after the vine died prematurely.
Small tubers on the remaining root that won't grow if there is no foliage to supply photosynthesis.

I'd like to dig all the potatoes to see what's there but there are a few vines with some signs of life. I'll leave them alone until they die on their own. I do have a large container of potato vines growing in the greenhouse and they still look somewhat healthy. Maybe they'll produce larger potatoes by the end of May.

Check back in early June, 2010 for an update on the red potato growing success or quite possibly, failure. (2010)

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